


right down the line

by TheoMiller



Series: send all your love down the wire [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Bisexual Steve Rogers, F/M, Female Tony Stark, POV Steve Rogers, Tony Stark Has Issues, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 18:11:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6818728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheoMiller/pseuds/TheoMiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toni Stark presses every button Steve's got.</p>
            </blockquote>





	right down the line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DibellaSong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DibellaSong/gifts).



> This fic is mainly for my dearest bro Dibellanyx, but also for anyone else who's Team Fuck Hydra and/or Team Let The Children Be Happy. 
> 
> @Dibellanyx: have some feelings + porn to cheer you up about people being mean to the precious child.

Toni Stark wears red lipstick.

It's insult to injury, really, because Toni Stark presses every button Steve's got, and the lipstick that exactly matches her armor is just the tip of the damned iceberg. And Steve knows a thing a two about ice. (What? He's allowed to make jokes like that. Toni certainly does it enough.)

For starters, she's got brown hair – Steve can't help but think of Bucky, when Toni's short-cropped hair is ruffled the same way Bucky's had been, in the war, or when she's been in the workshop and it's smoothed over with engine grease and probably just grease, he doesn't think she shampoos very often when she's in engineering mode.

But the short hair – pixie cut, the papers call it, although why they're still called the _papers_ when they're all digital now is completely beyond him – is new, something she did after Afghanistan.

And Steve's seen the before pictures. Shoulder length, glossy and carefully curled in all the pictures the press passes around (even though Steve knows for a fact that it's naturally curly, wild and bushy, because he's also seen the pictures of her in the hospital, after Afghanistan, from SHIELD's files)—it's an awful lot like Peggy's, in some of the pictures, though usually it's pulled over one shoulder and falls longer than Peggy's ever did.

She's prickly, snarky, infuriating, criticizes every other thing Steve does in the field—but she also follows the other 50% of the orders, sometimes with a quip, other times with nothing more than a "got it, Cap".

He makes the mistake, the first op after the Chitauri, of pushing her when she's decided she disagrees with an order. The sixteen civilians Jarvis and the HUD had picked up, that Steve hadn't noticed, nearly died. The guilt took a low, heavy residence in his stomach, and every chirp of Iron Woman entering the comms made him flinch, half-expecting her to say something cutting and icy about it.

She doesn't.

After the battle, though. She's barely out of the suit, Steve's still in his ash-smudged uniform right down to the damn cowl, when she's in his face. "Don't you ever," she says, her voice sharp, " _ever_ do that again."

"I didn't know," he retorts, because something about her just kicks him right into defensive before he can think. He's even clutching the shield when he says it, and isn't that just symbolic as all hell.

"I could've fuckin' told you, if you hadn't talked over me with your macho Army posturing bullshit," she snarls. "You want us to be a fucking team? Fucking act like it, and trust me."

He nods, numbly. "I shouldn't have doubted your intel."

That doesn't work. It doesn't even sort of work.

"My _intel_? Fuck you, Rogers."

She leaves.

Thor, who's carrying an unconscious Bruce, glances at Steve, his expression infuriatingly knowing. "She is right," he says gravely. "Your trust need not lie in her superior knowledge, but in her intentions."

"You fucked up," says Clint, like he's Thor's appointed translator. He is, however, ignoring Thor completely these days, and in fact, outside of ops, he pretty much only talks to Natasha and Steve himself. And it's only passing remarks to Steve. So it's possible he's just pretending Thor hadn't spoken at all.

Natasha just gives Steve a pitying look.

He realizes, eventually, that he needs to start trusting that Toni is a hero herself, not just a rich girl who occasionally plays at being hero in a suit of armor—trusting that she's making the right call, the good call, the call that will save everyone she can. (An alarming number of those calls seem to involve her risking her life. As if Steve didn't have enough nightmares about her sacrifice play in New York, about watching people he cares about falling.)

That's when he's really in trouble. Snarky, brown-haired, competent, clever, even bright red lips and a cocky grin, those he can dismiss as casual physical turn-ons. Not so much the fact that she's got a heart of gold, or that she's a damn good person to watch his back, reliable and always, always caring, usually too much.

Steve Rogers, God help him, has a _type_.

-

She's nothing like Bucky. She's bitter, angry at the world in a way Bucky never was—Steve asks her, once, about flying cars. She laughs at him, and tells him the government needs the airways clear for missiles.

Toni is also all too willing to throw a punch at Steve. They don't bicker nearly as badly as they did on the helicarrier, not without the spear screwing with their heads, but Steve is very bad at staying quiet, sometimes, and one of those times is when Toni focuses that bitter rage on Howard.

He should've known. Howard hadn't seemed the fatherly type, and Steve had only known him for a few short years, and Toni so rarely mentioned her parents. But he's caught off guard, and for a moment, when Toni says something about Howard being a complete bastard. He doesn't think of Howard Stark as a millionaire weapons maker and war racketeer, as a man who raised one of the most emotionally damaged people he's ever known (one of five, outside himself, which should really be a warning about this team). He thinks of Howard Stark, his friend, who'd talked to him when his plane was going down, the man who'd made him his shield and had asked him, once, half-drunk and guilt-ridden, how much the serum had hurt. Had said _Ernstine was a good man_ , a moment of sorrow and commiseration and apology.

So Steve tells her to take that back, and she tells him to shut his fucking trap, and he snaps something awful back about how she wouldn't have a goddamned thing if he hadn't fed it all to her on a silver spoon, and that's when things get nasty.

Toni snarls that he was the only person Howard ever gave a damn about, that Howard had made it pretty damn clear that she was second best and second place to a dead man, that Steve being charmed by her father's line of bullshit was a reflection on his intelligence and not Howard's actual worth as a person, and then goes in for the kill with _just because your daddy wasn't around for you to idolize—_

Steve isn't proud of what he does, which is loom over her with all his serum-given height and muscle, and say, "Don't you ever fucking talk about my family again."

Toni seems all too proud of what she does, which is punch him in the throat.

She also gets him an icepack, a glass of something that costs thousands of dollars and tastes like paint thinner smells, and while she doesn't apologize, she does say, "I wish I'd known him how he was, when you knew him." And, when he gets up to leave, she steals Steve's drink (which he hadn't wanted anyway, but it was still rude), swallows the entire glass of possible poison, and adds, "How old were you when you lost your mother?"

"Sixteen," says Steve.

Toni nods, and stands and stretches. "So was I," she tells him, quietly.

They go their separate ways, and she looks impossibly tiny getting into the elevator – angry, parentless, with a mean right hook – and that's about when Steve starts to realize they've got a little more in common than he thought.

-

She's definitely nothing like Peggy.

Peggy had been good at a lot of the same things Toni was. She made an art of going from all dolled up and looking the part to marching into battle with her pistol and her sensible boots—which were stolen from someone who'd made an untoward comment about her admittedly excellent legs. Steve's impressed, even after he sees it a hundred times, how quickly the flirty, quick-witted socialite in the expensive dress could become a firebrand of sleek technology dive-bombing a giant half-slug, half-crab alien. (Steve has no idea how that even exists. Toni blames Reed Richards, but she also blames Reed for bad weather and stock fluctuations, so he takes it with a grain of salt.)

But that had _been_ Peggy. It was who she was, a brilliant woman just as good at playing her superior officers like fiddles as she was at hitting her target, only sometimes with bullets, other times with practiced skill at drag-down, dirty, bar-style fighting, the kind of skill that Steve both envies and recognizes from his own cobbled-together skills from years of being beat to a pulp in alleys.

And, to a certain extent, both of those are Toni.

Steve sees her shark-smile when someone's tried to land a blow in a conversation, a press conference. He knows that smile. Peggy had smiled it right before punching that cadet in boot camp. Bucky, who Steve tries not to think about, the ache in his chest still raw because it was just months ago for him, used to smile it, nasty and dark, whenever he got between Steve and someone properly in need of a beating. Natasha nearly always has it playing at the corners of her mouth. Thor smiles like that when he gets to hit something with the hammer at full force, Clint when he's asked to make a shot no one could possibly make, Pepper Potts whenever someone named Justin Hammer came up, and once, _once_ , it had flitted across Bruce's face right before he became the Hulk. It had been the time someone made the mistake of hurting Toni.

It's the grin of someone who's just been challenged on something, challenged in an arena where they know they're going to win, or asked to do something they always want to do and rarely get an opportunity to do. It's the grin of warning when you've crossed a line that you really, really shouldn't have crossed.

Toni delights in tearing people apart on public television, especially on CSPAN, she has a special love of humiliating members of Congress. Probably because Rhodey's poker face keeps improving, and she needs to top her last bit of antics to really get him to crack.

But she's also a natural in the field, giving orders in a way that doesn't sound demanding, that makes it easy to say yes, especially when they all start learning to trust each other enough to know that when Toni starts giving these strange little instructions, it's all about to come together in a truly magnificent plan. Natasha and Clint always seem privy to exactly what these plans will entail. Or maybe they've been in SHIELD so long that they've just stopped being surprised when completely unthinkable stuff happens.

Either way, Tony is a huge part in making the cogs of the team flow, and she's a damn good fighter. Especially since she never, ever gives up, blasting repulsor shots at enemies even when she's in freefall, or Doctor Doom has flung her so hard that she can't do much but wait to lose momentum before she straightens out and tries to control her flight path for fear of whiplash.

She's a superhero and a tycoon of industry, she's strong and flexible and smart and kind and goes in for the kill so very effectively, just like Peggy, but unlike Peggy – who was always on equal footing in both of her roles – Steve is pretty sure that both of those are second to Toni Stark the engineer. Because as seamlessly as she fits into those other roles, he's pretty sure the real Toni Stark just wants to sit in her lab and tinker. She especially loves to tinker with broken things, and Steve thinks maybe that's why she likes the team so much.

His mother used to say that there was no use darning clothes made with bad fabric. He sees that, in the way Toni demands the best of everything and everyone around her, even when it's hard or inconvenient. She only wants to fix things that are already good, even broken. And somehow, she's decided even Steve is good enough to be worth fixing.

It takes him a while to figure out that that's why she's so self-destructive. She doesn't think she's good enough.

-

So. To recap. Steve's teammate is very attractive, and a very good person, and very much his type, but also very different than the other two people he's been in love with. (Is in love with. It's been two years, now, since waking up, but it doesn't go away. It just stops trying to drown him.)

And she also hates herself. Like, a lot. A worrying amount.

And he's finally managed to piece together a few things, which would help explain a lot of things. Like why she got so pissy when he and Sam started hanging out, or her insistence on tinkering with his bike, or the way she keeps making herself more and more of a target to draw fire away from him. Also why Natasha's pitying looks increase to at least two a day, and Pepper has been rather strange around him, and Bruce has been rather cold towards him.

Because he'd started thinking, _oh, hey, maybe this is requited_ , but every time he asks Toni if she wants to go get something to eat in a way that implies a date, she gets really weird about it.

Actually, once, when he'd been trying to work his way up to a fumbled confession of his feelings for her, she'd looked at him with this awful, horrified, broken look, and he'd backpedaled and made it sound like a team pep talk. Which had made her look even worse.

Most of the credit for this realization he's finally worked his way to has to go to Sam and Sue, who apparently get coffee and gossip, because neither of them get recognized in the streets. Which is both awful, because he knows why no-one notices them, and also just weird, because he's gotten to a point where he's pretty limited, friendship-wise, to the Avengers.

Even if Toni insists on inviting Logan and Johnny over to poker night, and Peter shows up, with Gwen and Miles and Wade, and Toni yells that they're all basically _twelve_ and then offers them alcohol anyway. Alicia comes at one point, with braille playing cards, and wipes the floor with them, because while they all know how to control their faces (except Peter, whose expressions are just ridiculous anyway, and thus impossible to read or predict), she hears tells they don't realize exist.

So. Sam and Sue, in their infinite wisdom and really incredible coffee, have carefully guided him to the epiphany that Toni doesn't really think she deserves Steve, and that if she lets him get close enough, he'll decide he really can't love who she actually is.

Which is ridiculous, and also—

"I'm a grown man," Steve says, which is totally not what he'd intended to say.

Toni doesn't react at first, apparently processing this completely nonsensical opener, and then cocks her head, swipes her holograms away, and turns to look at him. "Yeah," she says, "very grown. Tall, muscly, ancient. What's the problem?"

"I don't need anyone deciding for me what my feelings are, or will be. If I want to date someone, and they want to date me, then I want to damn well date them and give it a chance instead of running away from it out of some goddamn conviction that it's going to crash and burn!"

Guilt flickers across her face, and then she schools it carefully, the patented I'm-Toni-Stark-And-I-Don't-Give-A-Fuck-About-Anything expression settling into place all too easily. "Any particular reason you're shouting about your love life in my workshop? I mean, I have three doctorates – four doctorates, sorry – but none of them are in psychology, so—"

He strides across the room. "Toni," he says. "I like you. A lot. I want to date you."

"Everyone wants to date me at some point," she replies, "it's very flattering, really, but I do have a very full schedule, so we'll just wait for the feeling to pass and then continue as we have been—you know, teammates, colleagues, friends, roommates, occasionally the recipient of very loud and confusing attempts at girl talk, that whole bit. Agreed?"

"I love you," says Steve.

Toni recoils, like he'd hit her, but of course, she wouldn't recoil if he'd taken a swing at her, she would've swung back. Flirting, she could handle, a twist of her lips, a witty response, a casual brush-off. Fighting, she could handle, she'd fought bigger and scarier than him, even without the armor. Feelings were not something she was armored against, not like this, in her stained tank top and torn jeans instead of her suit, her hair wild and her usual lipstick missing, no flash of red on hand to protect herself.

"Don't say that," she says.

"When we found out Phil was alive, that's when I knew I was screwed. Because I was furious, and terrified, and guilty, and didn't even get past my brain just screaming _how?_ before you were slapping him on the back and saying, 'Way to miss all the excitement, Agent' and then immediately rambling about getting him a floor in the Tower. I remember how relieved he looked, like you'd just given him ten hours of sleep and taken a year off his age. Remember feeling like heel for making it about me, when he'd been put through all that pain for us. And it's just you, Toni, it's what you always do.

"I was so furious on the helicarrier, the way you were treating Bruce, but it was what he needed, you—you treated him like a whole person, you weren't afraid of the other guy or what he could do, you were basically the first person to tell him that being the Hulk wasn't this horrible condition, something to be treated and suppressed and feared and ashamed of, you basically said 'you're smart and cool and you turn into a giant green rage monster sometimes and I think all of that is pretty great' and I think – it makes me think maybe you would've liked me before the serum. When I had asthma and I was colorblind and I got sick all the time.

"And with Clint and Nat, they both trusted you, because you didn't care what kind of asset they were, because you found that incredible therapist, for both of them, because you were offering help to them without them having to ask for it, giving them a tool to help themselves instead of tiptoeing around them like I did, after Loki and what I've seen of Natasha's file and losing their handler like that.

"And I'll never forget, it was one of the—you have no idea, Toni, how much I adored you when you started talking to Thor about Jane, started drawing him in, making him part of the team. Part of the family. His whole face lit up, when you told him you could probably get Jane a job in town, and work on explaining her work to him in a way that would make sense in 'space royalty Shakespearean terms'. Because there I was, scrambling to get us to work together in the field, and you made us so much more than just a team.

"You were there for _all_ of us—for Sam and Kate, for the other teams, the ones who're out there alone, you welcomed all of them, and you pissed us all off at some point or another, because you're just so infuriating, but it's mostly because you want us to be better, to do better, so you challenge us, and you make us better, and I would do anything, anything at all, to make you believe that you're one of the best people, the best friends, that I've ever—"

He breaks off, because he thinks he's said too much. She looks so raw and vulnerable, but also… also, she looks kind of close to being happy, and he reaches out. "Can I—"

She dips her head in a nod, and he can't get his hands up fast enough, one sliding into her short hair, the other cupping her chin. There's a track down her cheek, and he carefully wipes it away with a thumb. "Hydraulics fluid," she says, the liar, and he doesn't call her out on it.

"I really, really fucking love you," he tells her, and kisses her. Somehow it breaks his heart more than anything else. It's soft and gentle and sweet.

Toni allows it for a moment, just the smallest of seconds, and then she grabs his shirt and hauls him in for a real kiss, and slides her hands up his chest to wind around his neck, which somehow leads to her legs wrapped around him, one of his hands under her thigh to keep her up, the other sliding up under the tank top, brushing the bottom of her bra.

"Fuck, fuck, off, seriously," she says, and lets go of his shoulders long enough to tug her shirt off. "Don't you fucking dare go prim and proper on me, Rogers, _fuck_ dating, I have had dinner with you every other night for _years_ , and you are stupidly perfect and swearing, and you had a speech, you had a goddamn speech."

Steve leans back in for another kiss, and hums against her mouth. "Was it a good speech? I could give another," he says, too ridiculously, giddily pleased not to joke with her, because _dear God he is making out with his best friend_.

She tugs on his hair and jerks her head towards a nearby table, and he's about to point out that he's not a horse, she can't lead him around like that, but lo and behold, they are suddenly right up against the table, and when he sets her down on it, she immediately spreads her knees so he can stand right up close to her, and pulls him back down to another kiss.

It's great, being able to have both hands free to roam over her skin, and she apparently agrees, because while he's distracted trying to figure out the damn clasp on her bra, she has managed to remove his belt and undo the button and zipper on his jeans, and her hands are sliding back up his stomach under his shirt.

The bra finally unhooks, and she's laughing when she leans away so she can get her own jeans off, and he tugs off his shirt and flings it—somewhere, he doesn't give a damn. Her jeans follow it a moment later, and he sees her shudder, involuntarily, at the steel table against her bare thighs.

Her damn bra is still hanging off her, but he's finally managed to kick his way out of his jeans, so he picks her back up.

"Do you think we could, like this?" she asks, breathlessly, in between desperate kisses.

"Not the first time," he says, "bed, c'mon."

"My bed is in the penthouse suite, Steve, _Steve_ , that is—Jarvis, how long of an elevator ride is that?"

There's a brief pause before Jarvis answers, "Approximately two minutes and fifteen seconds, considering that the nearest elevator is several floors away."

Steve sighs. "Do you have a couch?"

"What's wrong with right here?" She asks, with a careful little roll of her hips to illustrate how easy it would be to manage, if someone with superhuman strength were to tear away certain bits of underwear—which is a distracting thought, very distracting.

Steve shakes his head to clear it. "Sofa, Toni."

"Spoilsport," she says, pouting, and he kisses it away. "Next time?" she says.

"I have all the time in the world," he says, and then, "and a really short refractory period."

"You make an excellent argument. Sofa, then."

Toni lets him lower her carefully onto the couch, lets him carefully remove her ridiculous contraption of a bra and slide her panties off, and, instead of making a smart comment, just exhales on a quiet sigh when he starts pressing kisses as gently as he dares, down her belly, pausing to rest his forehead against the arc reactor, murmuring quiet praise, saying _it keeps you alive_. Because that matters, it's the most important thing. He moves on down the curve of her hipbone and the inside of her thigh, and she only rolls her eyes once, when he pauses to kiss a mole a few inches above her knee.

This is the one thing he actually has experience with, other than being on the receiving end of a handful of incredible blowjobs, and he's definitely not lost his touch, given that Toni's fingernails are digging into his scalp almost immediately.

He pays careful attention to her quick, shallow breathing – the way her breath hitches and her knees squeeze at him briefly when he punctuates the quick flicks of his tongue across her clit with a rougher press, flat and starting at her folds – the way she hisses out between her teeth, almost like it's painful, when he stops teasing and licks his way inside, curling his tongue into her – the way she inhales a sharp gasp a second before she shakes apart, her muscles tightening under his grip as he works her through it, still sucking gently at her clit as her ankles dig into his back. She has her head thrown back when he looks up through his lashes, and she's a long, lean expanse of tanned skin, her neck bared and fragile.

Steve noses at where her thigh meets her pelvis and breathes in the smell of her for a moment.

It doesn't take very long for her to recover enough to boss him around again: " _Steve_ ," she says, tugging at his hair. "Jesus, Steve, you—"

"Yes?" he says.

"You really need to fuck me, you fucking asshole," she says.

Steve grins. "You're a romantic, Toni."

-

The sex gets _better_ , somehow.

She talks him into doing it in the strangest of places—she backs him against the wall of windows in her suite and he fucks into her while she looks out on the city past his shoulder, mouthing at his ear and _talking_ – "Fuck, Steve, harder, please, I won't break—fuck, wish the whole city could see this, see you doing this to me—holding me up without even straining—America's darling and the head bitch—mine, all mine, god, you're fucking perfect."

She doesn't even let him get out of the uniform, once, before she's on him. It's still half-on while she's on her knees with her lips wrapped around his cock, playing him like a fiddle while he tries to remember how to stay standing, because she's sliding her tongue _just right_ over his glans, and then swallowing him down to the root, and her nails dig into his thighs in a way that probably should be painful but only stands to add pinpricks of white-hot sensation, and once he comes with a muffled cry she slides off and smiles at him with wet, swollen lips and shark-like teeth.

She drags him away from a news report featuring particularly vicious attack on Natasha's character and presses him down into the mattress and laughs at him and tells him Natasha can handle herself, and then she rides him, and he just grips her hips for dear life and can't help but be mesmerized by the way the glow of the arc reactor throws light on everything strangely with every movement, casting her breasts in faint blue light, and she leans down to kiss him while he slides his hands up her sides and cups them and plays with the pebbled peaks of her nipples, and the kiss is slow and sweet and twisted by her small grin and the stress melts away from his muscles.

She bares her neck to him and whispers his name reverently when he takes her to bed and undoes her dress slowly and slips her bra off of her with careful, soft touches. Then he mouths at the lace of her panties until they're soaked with a mix of her arousal and his saliva, and crawls back up to kiss her while he slides them down with one hand. She divests him of his clothing just as slowly and gently, calloused fingers skimming across the planes of his chest and her dark eyes soft and fond. He runs his hands over her, over all the spots that make her shiver underneath him, until she's all worked up, like a live copper wire, and when he presses into her, hot and slick and met by no resistance, she sighs happily and reaches up to clutch his neck and stroke his face as he sets a slow, rocking rhythm.

She laughs, breathless and loose after three orgasms in rather quick succession, still sprawled out on the table in her workshop where she'd finally convinced him to fuck her, rough and desperate and urgent, and the words _I love you_ fall from her lips as easily as if they belonged there. Steve kisses her, rather than reply, but days pass and she doesn't take it back. The next time she says it, he's just finished rubbing knotted tension out of her back after a week of board meetings, and she just hums quietly when he says, "I love you too."

Despite Jarvis assuring them that Natasha had neither accessed the system nor planted bugs nor been anywhere near their floor, the day after, Natasha finishes inquiring after the state of the board meetings, and follows it up with, "glad you two finally got your shit together and said your 'I love you's."

Toni spends half an hour trying to figure out how she did it, finally accepts that Natasha read it in their body language, and then just starts swearing a blue streak. Steve spends most of that time laughing so hard his stomach hurts.

-

"Oh my god," says Steve, as he paces.

Toni remains perfectly still, only her dark eyes moving, flickering between staring at the scan Jarvis has done, then at the cheap tech she'd spent twenty minutes bitching out, then off into space.

Steve mutters under his breath as he paces, until Toni finally snaps out of it enough to say, "Shouldn't I be the one freaking out?"

"Sorry, sorry, all about you right now," he says, immediately, and drops to his knees by her side. "Are you freaking out?"

"No," she says, "which is kind of why I want to freak out. Not being freaked out is freaking me out."

"What are we going to do?" he asks, quietly.

Toni sighs and reaches out to tangle her fingers in his hair. "My childhood was totally fucked," she says.

"I know," he says, "mine too."

"We're not just celebrities, though, we're superheroes, we're always out there fighting things, there's never a guarantee we're going to make it home, let alone in one piece…"

"The Tower isn't safe."

"I'm an alcoholic."

"And we don't know how the serum affected my chromosomes."

Toni's entire face shifts, focus and brilliance taking over. "You're worried about the DNA?" she says, and her voice is definitely rising there. "You. You are worried about this kid, what, exhibiting a little of the original Steve Rogers phenotype?"

"It wasn't just my height," he says. "Asthma, severe scoliosis, _color-blindness_ —"

"Are you going to love them any less?"

Steve blinks. "What? Jesus, Toni—"

"If I give birth to a kid with brittle bones and bad lungs and bad eyes, hell, if this kid comes out entirely blind, are you going to love them any less?"

"Of course not, but—"

Toni flicks him on the nose. "Then shut up," she says. "I don't care if this kid pops out with DNA from Steve Rogers the ass-kicking supersoldier or Steve Rogers the punk-ass little art student."

"You don't?" says Steve, because—because he'd always thought that women wouldn't want that with him, wouldn't want kids with a guy who was bound to doom any children he had to a life of wheezing and hospital trips. He'd never even considered it an option for him, between that and the war and the serum, and then the fact that he was queer too. "Wait. You want to keep it?"

"This mass of replicating cells is a pain in my ass," she says. "It's about as likely to kill me as Magneto or Doom or Reed Richards—"

"Reed isn't trying to kill you," Steve tells her, the old teasing argument coming up easily despite the situation.

"—but it's half you, so I want it, I want to have the kid it'll become, assuming that exposure to radiation, shrapnel damage, and a lifetime of substance abuse actually allow me to sustain it long enough to become, you know, an actual baby."

"It's also half you," he says, happily, because now he's picturing it. A child that's half his, with all the burdens that might come with it, but also half _Toni's_. Brown eyes are dominant, brown hair—there might be a tiny, fragile, perfect little piece of Toni Stark, one he can give everything he wishes he could go back in time and convince Howard to give Toni.

"Toni," he says, "you can't go into the field."

And she groans, eyes rolling to the ceiling. "You are going to be unbearable for the next thirty-seven weeks," she predicts, and she's _totally right_.

**Author's Note:**

> actual trainwreck waiting to happen
> 
> THERE'S A LIL PIC BOARD NOW. DIBELLANYX MADE IT.  
> http://dibellanyx.tumblr.com/post/144379320843/it-doesnt-take-very-long-for-her-to-recover


End file.
